It’s good not to take oneself too seriously. I know this, but sometimes my thoughts and ruminations don’t show that I apply this mantra. 

The other day an editor of an e-newsletter rejected an essay I’d sent her by telling me that the piece “sort of irritates” her, and that if it irritated her, it would irritate her readers. She asserted I was “shooting at other people” while “patting myself on the back.”  Of course, I hadn’t viewed my article like that!  I became peeved at what I thought was harsh, unfair, and mean-spirited commentary. “Why not just say the usual? ‘This isn’t for us. No thank you.’?”

At any rate, I mulled over her remarks for a while. Then, I got back to my life.  My neighbor told me her brother had to have seven liters of fluid drawn off his stomach.  I called her the following day to see how things were with him, and he was better. I asked about her day.  She said she’d gone to a new hairdresser, one that another friend had tried recently and had been pleased with since the haircut made her pal look years younger.  “How did it work out for you?” I asked.

As a “mature” woman I still find myself stumbling through life like a camel wearing stilettoes in the desert. As a writer I’ve learned to put life’s blisters, sink holes, and sandstorms to good use. I’ve been doing it for years, have earned from it.

One of my earliest blisters related to money - lack of it obviously. I was living in the UK then, being threatened with seven days imprisonment for overdue non-payment of council tax. I was a young, single mum of four children, the oldest was 10. I owed £27.16p. I had £0.68p in my bank account. 

The thought of a whole week of undisturbed sleep and bed space plus three meals a day that I hadn’t had to buy, prepare and wash up, appealed, as did the opportunities for uninterrupted adult conversations and free training classes. A bonus would be - providing I made it out alive - a dramatic life experience to write about.

Writing is my pleasure, my compulsion, and an important way for me to communicate with the world. I’m not recommending that you adopt my writing process; it’s a bit erratic. Nor am I touting it as some stellar method of producing major literary work. I’m only describing a way I’ve found to meld writing and farming together. 

When I first arrived in Beijing in the mid-2000s, armed with a press secretary’s résumé and a head full of Capitol Hill talking points, I thought I understood how stories worked. I believed narratives were tools to shape opinions, arguments to be won. But China, in its relentless, humming complexity, had other plans. It was in a cramped, smog-cloaked alleyway near the Bookworm bookstore—a place I’d later immortalize in my memoir Beijing Bound—that I learned the hardest lesson of my writing life: sometimes, the most powerful stories aren’t the ones you tell, but the ones you finally learn to hear.

My family occasionally prays down by the Mississippi River with the Nibi walkers, a group of Indigenous women and water-tenders. Water is life, so we plant our feet in the sand and offer thanks. One morning, the Anishinaabe elder Sharon Day translated her prayer for us: “Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, have pity on us.” At her feet was a quilt, a copper bowl of river water, a shell cupping burnt sage. Behind her the river eddied and flowed. “All of creation existed without us,” she explained, “and will exist after us. We are dependent on creation. We’re dependent on the web of life. It is not dependent on us.” Humans are mighty, yes, but also small and helpless, and remembering this is good. 

Before writing for teens, I worked with them as a high school educator. Though I left teaching to focus on raising a family, the guiding principles I relied on as a teacher continue to inform my approach to writing and editing for young adults: authenticity, respect, and hope.

Before we get into specifics, a quick reminder: while young adult literature is popular among college students and older adults, teens are your target audience. If you’re writing or editing a YA novel, they should be top of mind. Growing teens face physical, mental, social, and emotional changes that can often feel confusing and overwhelming. Teens’ schedules are also increasingly busy, as is the very real pressure to perform - a pressure that’s only increased with the advent of social media.

I was born in the city but grew up in the country where I discovered that words could take me beyond my five senses. That insight began on a hike in the woods with my father. We had stopped to watch bees buzzing around wildflower along the trail. I knew the bees were gathering honey but wondered what else was going on. When we got home, my curiosity led me to a library where I discovered it wasn't a one-way affair. Those flowers were gathering pollen from the bees. It was fun to watch bees buzzing from flower to flower, but it was reading words in a book that transformed my watching into understanding. Bees do things to flowers, flowers do things to bees, and words do things to me, so I want to do things with words.

Now, with the years piled on top of each other like pages in a book, I'm more aware of why I write and why it matters. Some reasons are personal and some are public, but they all stem from my desire to do something with words. And knowing the reasons helps me identify my intended readers and how I can reach them. Each of my reasons has a different audience—me when the reason is personal and others when the reason is public.

I am the introvert; she, the extrovert. She is your friend as soon as you meet her. We were born across the globe from one another, me in a city among gray buildings, she surrounded by nature. I grew up through the storm of a communist-born dictatorship, that of Ceaușescu in Romania, and she experienced the childhood freedom in the States. Yet we had so much in common, my mother-in-law and me. We both loved to explore. We just started from different places; me from the inside of myself, she from the outside of herself, and we rescued each other from the limbo of wanting to write a message to the world and the fear that it may not be good enough for anyone to care about it. 

Rhona (my mother-in-law) is a caregiver,She feels stuck at home sometimes, as her mother can’t leave her bed anymore, so she finds refuge in her happy childhood stories. When she shared them with her friend, a primary school teacher, Rhona noticed that she may not be the only one who would relish her past adventures.  Once she started writing, the stories practically wrote themselves. The hurdle came afterwards, when no one seemed interested in reading them. She did not know what to do for a long while until she saw something I posted on my blog, and felt inspired, recognizing  a fellow writer. And yet, it still took several years until she dared show me these stories. She was not worried about rejection as much as she was about asking too much. She loves her son, her first-born, and until it came to challenging her core values manifested through a voting choice, she had always tiptoed around us, always worried she may upset the balance - but she couldn’t change her identity just for my sake.

Several times a day, I find myself at a loss for words. Meaning gets caught unformed behind my teeth, or I puzzle through an avalanche of sounds whose hidden significance refuses to emerge. 

I’m in this fix because in midlife I moved to a place where I’d never learned the language, trailing after my German-speaking Swiss husband and hoping for the best. As an American in Switzerland, I’m a one-language person in a land where everyone else seems comfortable with least three or four. For as long as I could remember, English had been my superpower. Now I’ve lost that strength and had to start over, inarticulate as a newborn. 

In an earlier stage of life, working in editing and communications, I was proud of my knack for correct spelling, my wide vocabulary, my ability to fine-tune manuscripts to better express what their authors wanted to say. I’d been on a quest for perfection in words; these days, when I open my mouth to speak, I can be happy if I come up with any words at all. 

One of my most helpful writing practices is not writing at all—rather, setting the pen (or keyboard) aside and doing handwork. Some writers knit, some carve wood, some paint, some throw pots. I coil pine-needle baskets.

First, I must leave my writer's desk and go outdoors. I head for a park or forest in search of long-needle pines, then gather a sack of dry brown needles from beneath the trees. Ponderosas are best, and since there are few near my home, I am always on the lookout to find them—yes, like keeping an ear out for a ‘just-right’ word, a good line, a story concept. Sometimes you find them where you least expect them. A neighbor’s yard. An empty lot. 

I take the needles home, remove the debris, wash them and set them out to dry. I study the needles' conditions, their lengths and colors, and begin to imagine a basket design. I liken this to sorting ideas before writing—so many notes, fragments of ideas, bits and pieces, thoughts to sort out.

Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” 

This always made perfect sense to me. And when I  taught high school English, the students would erupt in debate when I would introduce this book.  

If it’s not true, it’s not true!

If you say it’s true, and it’s not, then that’s lying. 

It’s black and white. 

But here’s the thing: It’s anything but black and white. Our society embraces binary thinking: Pick a side, it’s either this or that, etc. And the enigma is our society simultaneously loves coaching one another on “speaking your truth.”